I have, in an effort to reduce my intake of bile, mostly avoided reading Mark Kleiman since the election, but in the course of finding great humor in the New York Times' sudden discovery - now that a legal defense is needed for one of its reporters - that the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA "operative" may not have involved a crime after all, Tom Maguire points us (indirectly) to this Kleiman post from 2003 arguing that the disclosure may have involved a violation, and conspiracy to violate, a provision of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793(d), which imposes stiff criminal penalties on the following:

Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.

Now, the usual disclaimers apply about trying to construe this statute without having read the surrounding provisions or the caselaw construing it. But Kleiman, a non-lawyer, has raised this point, so let's just stay with his analysis of the statutory text. Kleiman argues that a violation of this infrequently-used statute would be easy to prove in this case. Let's walk through his reasoning:

[N]otice how much weaker the scienter requirement is under the Espionage Act than under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act: "reason to know" that the information "could be used" to the injury of the United States.

So far, so good; "reason to know" does indeed make it unnecessary to prove the actual knowledge or intention of the person making the disclosure, and instead focuses on objective facts that such person would be in a position to know, which is easier to prove.

It would be very hard to argue that the Plame disclosures weren't of information that the disclosers had reason to know could be used to damage the United States.

This is where I think Kleiman is all wrong. The violation being urged here is, at least based on the public record as it stands, in the nature of a technical violation whose potential for harm required a certain degree of extrapolation - i.e., that her identity as a CIA operative some indeterminate number of years earlier was argued to be damaging mainly because of the precedent it set and the potential, still debated, of harm for sources who may have been known to associate with her. Assuming that the identity of a CIA agent is "information relating to the national defense" - I would think so, under common parlance, but there may be precedents under the statute to suggest a more limited reading of the term - it would not at all be difficult or unusual for a jury to determine that this was not "information . . . which . . . could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation," if under all the circumstances it appeared that Plame's ties to undercover work had grown sufficiently stale that there was no longer anything resembling an active operation left to compromise.

Moreover, in a case brought under the Espionage Act the timing of Valerie Plame's most recent foreign assignment and the vigor with which the CIA was keeping her identity under wraps would both be irrelevant.

Technically irrelevant, in the sense of not being a statutory requirement, as it is under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But you can't seriously argue that it has nothing to do with whether her identity as a CIA employee would damage national security if exposed. Clearly, little if any damage could be done by disclosing that she was a Langley-based analyst. Equally clearly, damage could well be done if she had still been an active undercover agent. The extent to which she was still involved in things that could be damaging if her identity was exposed is, in fact, the crucial question in figuring whether any harm could reasonably be expected to befall the nation's security from the disclosure.

There's also the argument, of course, that potential harm to national security would be balanced against ways in which the disclosure could benefit national security; a statute with this sort of potential-harm requirement would presumably afford the defendants the chance to argue that the overall benefit rendered the potential for injury, on balance, trivial. Even though you could make the "it's not theirs to decide" argument in response, the "reason to know" standard would seem to necessarily incorporate what the person would, in all the circumstances, have reason to believe would be the overall consequences.

Now, the main benefit of exposing Plame's identity was obviously political - to defuse his attacks on Bush by demonstrating that Wilson was basically a hack who got the assignment through his wife - so I don't think such a defense would be a real good fit here. Still, the damage caused by the charge that the president lied to the world about Saddam's efforts to get uranium in Africa is damage that could go to the nation's overall reputation - that was certainly an argument raised by many of Bush's antagonists - and showing the problems with the charge could, I suppose, be argued to ameliorate that harm. As I said, I'm not endorsing that argument, but it does suggest yet another avenue of complication for Kleiman's analysis.

Moreover, the fact of a prior disclosure, unless that disclosure had been so convincing and so widely publicized as to preclude the possibility that any additional damage would be done by repetition, would not be a defense.

Again, this seems obviously wrong. The existence of the B-2 "stealth bomber," to pick a random example, is a fact of our security whose disclosure could harm our ability to conduct surprise attacks. Except for the fact that the bomber's existence is not at all a secret. There are many areas of law that turn on disclosures of information, and the idea that something was not really much of a secret is a routine and obvious defense.

Anyway, at a minimum, Kleiman breezes past a whole battery of problems with using such a statute in a case where there may well be strong arguments on the facts that Plame had been out of the field too long for any of this to have any real-world impact.

I haven't had the heart to see whether Mr. Kleiman has reacted to the news that the Times has switched sides ( he can cover whatever stories he wants to, right?)

But wouldn't another obstacle to a successful prosecution develop under:

It would be very hard to argue that the Plame disclosures weren't of information that the disclosers had reason to know could be used to damage the United States.

It is not clear just what was disclosed to Novak. A theory is that what was disclosed to him was based on an INR memo describing the meeting at which Wilson was selected to go to Africa.

Ms. Plame brought him to the meeting, introduced him around, and left. Per the INR fellow's notes, she was Wilson's wife, with the CIA - he made no mention (and probably had no knowledge) of her past as a NOC, nor did he mention her name.

So, if that was the source, the leaker really had no reason to think that she had any covert past at all. Her maiden name was available at Wilson's on-line bio (since scrubbed, natch), so Novak could have run that detail down easily.

As to her being a CIA "operative", Novak does not actually put those words in the mouths of the two Admin sources in his famous column. Since he also talked to a CIA press rep, who knows where that came from?

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

Imagine someone standing up in court to make the argument that destroying a CIA agent's cover could reasonably be expected to improve the security of the US. Since, ladies and gentlemen, the agent was part of the incompetent team that gave us all the wrong intelligence on Iraq, mixed in circles politically opposed to the President, and wasn't currently doing anything very important anyway.

If this were a valif argument it would be a matter of personal opinion whether or not it was illegal to out an agent. It would be legal to expose any agent you happened to know about and thought wasn't doing a good job.

You have to ask yourself what the purpose of the law is: if such arguments were valid, it would provide little or no protection to the CIA. It would be legal to expose any or all state secrets if in your opinion that didn't cause net harm. Aldrich Ames might not have been guilty since what he leaked probably didn't materially damage US security. It's a crazy argument.

The correct argument is as follows: if something has 'Secret' or equivalent wording stamped on it, or you know that some arm of government has deliberately invested resources in keeping a fact secret, that is a sufficient reason to believe it is against national interests to reveal it. Your opinion of the consequences is not relevant. If it is clear that the government wants to keep it secret, it is illegal to reveal it.

Now if you think that a CIA press officer would tell a reporter that X or Y is an operative just like that... well they must be a bigger bunch of infighting incompetents that we thought.